Antti Korhonen (AK): the great benefit Ekahau delivers to an enterprise is often related to two key business process parameters: employee productivity and asset utilization. These key indicators are very important in several industry sectors, in healthcare, manufacturing, and OIL/GAS, to name the few. For example, when a modern hospital is trying to improve their operational efficiency, and increase their bottom line profits, Ekahau RTLS provides a real-time visibility to the asset and staff workflow patterns, and makes it possible to analyze and improve their critical processes for better profitability.

Antti Korhonen

As the healthcare segment is also the number one adopter of Wi-Fi networks, it is clearly the number one growth market for Ekahau. Other emerging markets also include security and safety related applications, which we see cross several industry verticals as a horizontal business. The real-time location information can significantly improve people safety and security. In healthcare, for example, the patient safety can be improved during the emergency, when the patient location is known real-time. Ekahau RTLS is already used in nursing homes to track the location of wandering Alzheimer patients. Other safety application examples are VIP officer tracking in MIL/GOV locations, driven by U.S. Home Land Security initiative, or tracking field engineers in an oil refinery during an emergency.

As Ekahau RTLS leverages the standard wireless Wi-Fi infrastructure and investment, it provides a third "killer app" for Wi-Fi in addition to data and voice: Location! This applies to all industry verticals using Wi-Fi, and enables Ekahau to follow the rapid growth path of Wi-Fi market.

AK: In the past, the drawbacks of the traditional RTLS systems have been limiting the growth of the RTLS market. Using proprietary or vendor specific technologies, like infrared, RFID, and TDOA , have been just too labor intensive and too high cost to implement for any meaningful ROI. Now that the same benefits can be delivered over the standard Wi-Fi infrastructure, the RTLS market is opening very rapidly. The remaining challenges are in the field of creating better awareness among the enterprise management, and RTLS standardization. For example, a standardized interface with all major ERP systems would help RTLS vendors to bring benefits to the enterprise process improvement.

AK: Originally, Ekahau’s patented core innovation came from a group of top-talent scientist in the Helsinki University, Finland. So we have a very solid scientific innovation here as a background. As any RF-network is very unpredictable of nature and therefore presents a complex environment to calculate any exact location data from standard network signals, our expertise in the field of probabilistic mathematics and statistical modeling has been very important when building a reliable, industry-grade 24/7 end-customer solution. However, today Ekahau prides itself in being first and foremost a customer driven organization. Listening to a customer voice every day, is the number one priority when building the Ekahau application layer on top the scientific foundation.

AK: I would talk about two separate camps of competitors. First, those who provide RTLS as a proprietary infrastructure based solution, as infrared, TDOA and RFID. The problem of these solutions is the high cost of the HW infrastructure. Even with passive RFID, the tags are low cost, but they are designed to be used as ID tags, as a replacement for barcode, and not as real-time location tags. Therefore RFID based solutions are also suffering from the prohibitive high infrastructure cost of reader gates and antennas. Secondly, there are some Wi-Fi infrastructure vendors who are also providing location capabilities, but most often the accuracy that such a vendor-specific, non-standard solutions can deliver, is at best in a zone-level, while enterprises really need reliable room-level accuracy for any meaningful campus-wide RTLS deployment. With Ekahau Wi-Fi based RTLS, the enterprise can eliminate any proprietary infrastructure cost, while still benefiting from the reliable and precise system performance. Furthermore, when comparing Ekahau against this second group of competitors, the great advantage we also have is that Ekahau can deliver a turn-key whole solution RTLS - everything included, while the Wi-Fi vendors need to partner with different vendors to deploy RTLS. We are very highly focused on the RTLS market.

AK: Ekahau RTLS can reach up to 3.5ft accuracy in a typical indoor hospital environment. Such precise accuracy is not a value itself, but it is important because with a less accurate system, it is difficult to reach reliable and continuous room-level accuracy. So, for Ekahau customers, high location accuracy means a high confidence and reliability in room accuracy.

AK: When tracking standard Wi-Fi enabled laptops and PDAs, we can rely on any proven Windows or Wi-Fi based security features. With Ekahau T201 location tags, we can use WEP keys, Virtual LANs, and in the future also any standard authentication procedures, to maximize the security.

On the other hand, when looking at security as a potential RTLS market, we play an important role there through partners like Air Defense. When Air Defense’s Intrusion Detection System (IDS) identifies a hacker within the enterprise Wi-Fi, Ekahau supports the IDS by pinpointing the real-time location of the hacker.

AK: Ekahau is using highly advanced power management methods to secure the maximum battery life. The Ekahau Wi-Fi tag also has a motion sensor feature, which enables the tag to be active only during the motion. When the tag stops moving, it will report the last location and go to sleep. Also in Ekahau RTLS the tag "blink rate" can be tuned over the air, and can be made to blink every second or even once every week, and therefore save battery when possible.

AK: Ekahau core innovation and patents apply to any wireless technology. Similarly, regardless of Wi-Fi standard, 802.11a,b,g…. Ekahau RTLS works. In general Ekahau’s underlying technology is future-proof for any future standard wireless networks that provide base station ID and signal strength information. For example, the Ekahau system also works with GSM and Wi-Max, and is just a business question for us if and when to package the current solution for those markets. Right now the main focus is to keep Ekahau solution functional with any current and future Wi-Fi standards, as Wi-Fi is where the money is today, in enterprise RTLS.